A top House lawmaker is developing legislation to codify the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation into law.

The move to codify CAISI comes as lawmakers and the Trump administration debate and discuss the federal government’s role in overseeing AI technology.

Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s research and technology subcommittee, said he has a “forthcoming” bill dubbed the “Great American AI Act.”

During a Wednesday hearing, Obernolte said the bill will formalize CAISI’s role to “advance AI evaluation and standard setting.”

“The work it does in doing AI model evaluation is essential in creating a regulatory toolbox for our sectoral regulators, so everyone doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Obernolte said.

The Biden administration had initially established an AI Safety Institute at NIST. But last summer, the Trump administration rebranded the center to focus on standards and innovation.

Last September, the center released an evaluation of the Chinese “DeepSeek” AI model that found it lagged behind U.S. models on cost, security and performance. More recently, CAISI released a request for information on securing AI agent systems.

Despite the Trump administration’s rebranding, however, Obernolte noted the NIST center’s functions have largely stayed consistent. He argued codifying the center would provide stability.

“I think everyone would agree, it’s unhealthy for us to have every successive administration spin up a brand new agency that, essentially, is doing something with a long-term mission that needs continuity,” he said.

Obernolte asked Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, what he thought about codifying the center into law.

Kratsios said CAISI is an “very important part of the larger AI agenda.” He also said it was important for the administration to reframe the center’s work around innovation and standards, rather than safety.

“It’s absolutely important that the legacy work around standards relating to AI are undertaken by CAISI, and that’s what they’re challenged to do,” Kratsios said. “And that’s the focus that they should have, because the great standards that are put out by CAISI and by NIST are the ones that, ultimately, will empower the proliferation of this technology across many industries.”

Later on in the hearing, Kratsios said the NIST center would play a key role in setting standards for “advanced metrology of model evaluation.”

“That is something that can be used across all industries when they want to deploy these models,” he said. “You want to have trust in them so that when everyday Americans are using, whether it be medical models or anything else, they are comfortable with the fact that it has been tested and evaluated.”

Obernolte and Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), meanwhile, have also introduced the “READ AI Act.” The bill would direct NIST to develop guidelines for how AI models should be evaluated, including standard documentation.

Asked about the bill, Kratsios said it was worthy of consideration, but added that any such efforts should avoid just focusing on frontier AI model evaluation.

“The reality is that the most implementation that’s going to happen across industry is going to happen through fine-tuned models for specific use cases, and it’s going to be trained on specific data that the large frontier models never had access to,” he added.

“In my opinion, the greatest work that NIST could do is to create the science behind how you measure models, such that any time that you have a specific model – for finance, for health, for agriculture – whoever’s attempting to implement it has a framework and a standard around how they can evaluate that model,” Kratsios continued. “At the end of the day, the massive proliferation is going to be through these smaller, fine-tuned models for specific use cases.”

Discussion around the role of the NIST center comes amid a larger debate over the role of the federal government in setting AI standards. In a December executive order, President Donald Trump called for legislative recommendations to create a national framework that would preempt state AI laws.

But during the hearing, Kratsios offered few specifics on what he and Special Adviser for AI and Crypto David Sacks have been considering.

“That’s something that I very much look forward to working with everyone on this committee on,” Kratsios said.  “What was clear in the executive order, specifically, was that, any proposed legislation should not preempt otherwise lawful state actions relating to child safety protections, AI compute and data infrastructure, and also state government procurement and use of AI.”

“But, we look forward over the next weeks and months to be working with Congress on a viable solution,” he added.

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